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Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated

reuters.com

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Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated

#41

Post by rayiner »

stretchwithme wrote: post #38
rayiner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're going with a cost/benefit analysis, it should be noted that the NSA accessing data that AT&T, Google, Facebook, etc, already collect is just about the cheapest sort of counter-measure you could have to terrorism. The "good old fashioned police work" that people keep suggesting would be far more expensive and invasive.

Then let people volunteer for it in exchange for lower taxes. If the impact is truly minor, there should be many takers and much savings.

That makes no sense.

Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated

#42

Post by comefrom10 »

mpyne wrote: post #22
Brushfire wrote: post #16

This is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake. Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous…

Are you saying that the U.S. has more than ~300 people overseas actively working on terror plots at any given time? You can't represent cost:threat ratio as dollars per person tracked. The major reason for why the program exists is to detect and break-up one-off major terrorist plots so even if the NSA was detecting all worldwide terror plans against the U.S. the number of people they were tracking would never be ver…

Perhaps if the US government wants to protect us from terrorism it should stop acting like a terrorist organization abroad.

Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated

#43

Post by mattnewton »

threeseed wrote: post #30
Brushfire wrote: post #16

This is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake. Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous…

But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio. Sorry but this is just nonsense. Major terrorist acts e.g. 9/11 have a devastating impact on the economy. It results in a country-wide drop in consumer spending, consumer confidence, business spending, business confidence, hiring etc. As well as locally in areas like tourism. It alone accounted for a 1.1% drop in the third quarter GDP…

Who says the cost is purely economic? What is the value of the first and fourth amendments to americans?

Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated

#44

Post by mattnewton »

Brushfire wrote: post #27
brown9-2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a large part of the picture is being lost in the title of this submission. It's not that the NSA's entire mission has boiled down to monitoring 300 phone numbers worldwide. What is being stated is that "[l]ast year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA". ( http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2021199412_nsatechd... )

I guess my point was that if they only use it 300 times, is it really worth having the program around given the combo of costs both in privacy and dollars? Of course there is more at play here, but they should be selling how many terrorist attacks they avoided, now how many people they snooped.

This. The privacy cost is relevant and not easily quantifiable.

Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated

#45

Post by mpyne »

comefrom10 wrote: post #42
mpyne wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that the U.S. has more than ~300 people overseas actively working on terror plots at any given time? You can't represent cost:threat ratio as dollars per person tracked. The major reason for why the program exists is to detect and break-up one-off major terrorist plots so even if the NSA was detecting all worldwide terror plans against the U.S. the number of people they were tracking would never be ver…

Perhaps if the US government wants to protect us from terrorism it should stop acting like a terrorist organization abroad.

What was the excuse for 9/11 then? I seem to recall it was nothing more "terroristic" than having U.S. forces deployed in Saudi Arabia, at the request of that nation.

But let me guess, victim blaming is OK, as long as the victims are Americans?

Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated

#46

Post by [deleted] »

threeseed wrote: post #30
Brushfire wrote: post #16

This is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake. Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous…

But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio. Sorry but this is just nonsense. Major terrorist acts e.g. 9/11 have a devastating impact on the economy. It results in a country-wide drop in consumer spending, consumer confidence, business spending, business confidence, hiring etc. As well as locally in areas like tourism. It alone accounted for a 1.1% drop in the third quarter GDP…

[deleted]

Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated

#47

Post by mpyne »

mattnewton wrote: post #43
threeseed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio. Sorry but this is just nonsense. Major terrorist acts e.g. 9/11 have a devastating impact on the economy. It results in a country-wide drop in consumer spending, consumer confidence, business spending, business confidence, hiring etc. As well as locally in areas like tourism. It alone accounted for a 1.1% drop in the third quarter GDP…

Who says the cost is purely economic? What is the value of the first and fourth amendments to americans?

Intercepting messages doesn't violate the First Amendment.

Intercepting messages with either "reasonable" means or "unreasonable means + probable cause warrant" also doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment.

So I wouldn't necessarily make your sole complaint about the legality of the program, as it may very well soon be both legal and Constitutional.

Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated

#48

Post by nano111 »

ISL wrote: post #8

But how many phone numbers do they have the capacity to closely scrutinize?

Soon, they will apparently add yottabytes of storage with their Utah's data center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center).. that doesn't say how much they can analyze but probably many more then 300.. (1 yottabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000GB)

Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated

#49

Post by betterunix »

threeseed wrote: post #30
Brushfire wrote: post #16

This is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake. Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous…

But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio. Sorry but this is just nonsense. Major terrorist acts e.g. 9/11 have a devastating impact on the economy. It results in a country-wide drop in consumer spending, consumer confidence, business spending, business confidence, hiring etc. As well as locally in areas like tourism. It alone accounted for a 1.1% drop in the third quarter GDP…

"No 9/11 and there would have been no costly invasion into Iraq/Afghanistan which has cost trillions of dollars and an obscene number of lives"

I have some doubts about us not going to war had there been no terrorist attack. Perhaps it would have been in a different country or continent, but there has been military action under every administration since Eisenhower. I have this sneaky suspicion that the war in Iraq would have happened regardless of any terrorist attack. I would even go as far as to say that the war in Iraq would have happened under a hypothetical Gore administration.

"So out of all the things the government does protecting its citizens seems like something that will always be "worth the money"."

Assuming, of course, that this program has accomplished anything. We are still waiting to see what details will be declassified. It is not enough that supporters of the program claim terrorist plots were stopped; we need to know (a) if the program was actually important to stopping those plots and (b) if those plots were realistic to begin with.

Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated

#50

Post by AnthonyMouse »

threeseed wrote: post #30
Brushfire wrote: post #16

This is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake. Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous…

But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio. Sorry but this is just nonsense. Major terrorist acts e.g. 9/11 have a devastating impact on the economy. It results in a country-wide drop in consumer spending, consumer confidence, business spending, business confidence, hiring etc. As well as locally in areas like tourism. It alone accounted for a 1.1% drop in the third quarter GDP…

The economic numbers you're listing are pretty clearly dwarfed by the amount we've been spending on anti-terrorism.

And nobody can take you seriously trying to shovel the excessive amount of money spent on anti-terrorism (or, as for Iraq, not on anti-terrorism) into the cost of a terrorist act and then trying to use that as justification for spending money on anti-terrorism. If we spent half the GDP on anti-terrorism after 9/11 you would be claiming 9/11 cost us half the GDP and that therefore justifies spending half the GDP on it. It's circular logic.

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